Читать книгу The Science-Fantasy Megapack - E. C. Tubb - Страница 15

I’LL KISS YOU GOODNIGHT, by Frederick H. Christian

He has just gone, although his haunted face seems still to hang in the silent space before my eyes. I stand alone in the deserted hall, the small light above the porch casting its yellow tine across the stairway, and my mind screams like a tortured bird. I cannot escape what he has told me. It could not be true that in the age of interplanetary exploration, in a world on the threshold of the conquest of all major diseases, that so medieval a terror can still exist. And yet, and yet.…

It began with the accident. It was my own fault, and I have no excuses for that. My mind full of other things, I stepped off a pavement without looking, straight into the path of an oncoming lorry.

I woke up in hospital, encased in plaster, my head bandaged, my life in balance. Many blood transfusions, specialists’ examinations, two operations and six weeks later I was brought home in a wheelchair, and in the weeks since then I have been unable to work.

The doctors spoke of slight brain damage caused by massive concussion, of damage to the optical nerves, of a hugely shocked metabolism. They said I might experience new and unknown allergies, headaches, even hallucinations. And so I braced myself for them, and when they came they were not the shock to me they might otherwise have been.

They were unconnected with anything within my previous experience. For instance, I have always loved Continental cooking, and my wife always has garlic cloves in the kitchen. She had to throw them out after I was violently ill when she used garlic in a salad we ate one evening. It got progressively worse until I could not bear the thought of that garlic and my entire body categorically refused to go into the kitchen where it was kept. I tried to conquer it, to make my mind the master of my sweating, convulsing frame, but it was no use. As soon as Elizabeth took the garlic out into the dustbin, the seizures passed and I was normal again.

As time went by another curious thing happened. In the daytime, I found myself becoming more and more lethargic, less interested in the day-to-day events of our world, falling into deep sleeps from which my frantic wife could not awaken me.

And yet at night, as soon as the sun was down, I was wide awake, all thought of slumber vanished, prowling the house and fighting a curious urge to go out, nowhere in particular, to roam, to prowl, to tread the soft stillness of the misty night.

I discovered, too, that sunlight hurt my eyes, and that I could no longer stand the soft caress of the sun upon my skin. Where in other times I would have basked happily for months on end in the blazing heat on a Malaga beach, I could now hardly spend an hour in comfort on a dull day in the English countryside.

The doctors shrugged their shoulders; they prescribed blood tonics and iron tablets and other drugs to combat what they diagnosed as chronic anaemia. Strengthen your bloodstream, they told me, and you’ll be fit in no time. But none of their remedies worked.

My wife and I were hardly what you would call regular churchgoers, but, like many families, we would attend our local parish church at Easter and Christmas. When Easter came, we drove down to the church. A strange sense of dread took possession of me; the nearer we got to the church, the more tense my entire body became. Sweat streamed from me as we turned into Church lane, and although I exerted every ounce of my willpower to prevent it, a high keening noise issued from my throat, terrorising my wife, who told me afterwards that she had never heard anything like it coming from a human being—and my wife was once a nurse in a mental hospital. The worst, however, was yet to come.

At the bottom end of Church lane, the open portals of the church face the road, and the spire of St. Margaret’s casts its shadow across the little cul-de-sac. I do not know what happened; I can only relate what my wife told me. As we parked the car opposite the church, I had a fit. They rushed me to hospital, where I awoke recalling nothing except an insane dream which left the memory of only one word in my brain: death.

* * * *

You cannot keep conditions such as mine secret in a small community. I knew that our neighbors were shaking their heads sadly, and talking about me as ‘that poor mad fellow.’ Even my beloved Elizabeth looked drawn and careworn, for my allergies, my strange nocturnal habits, and my constant feeling of coldness—for my skin had become clammy to the touch—distressed her and frightened her.

All the specialists we saw, all the doctors—and there were many—could find no physical reasons for my sickness, my daytime comas, my night-time alertness, my strange revulsion for the church. (A visit from our vicar, a kind and gentle mean, had driven me into a frenzy, my teeth clenched, spittle and foam drooling from my lips, and that unearthly keening sound issuing from my corded throat, and—so I am told—a look of utter terror upon my face.)

So, as time passed, I became more and more a recluse, haunted by strange dreams of night, where I would soar unaided through soft darkness to some predestined place where warmth and love and affection would be mine, where there would be people who understood my affliction, and who would consider only those not like ourselves as abnormal. And I eventually resigned myself to the fact that sooner or later my wife would consign me to a mental institution and that there I would go quickly mad.

And then tonight, the doorbell rang. I opened the door, probably with some surprise showing on my face. For it was late—my wife was already in bed.

He stood there in the darkness, the small yellow light throwing vertical, unearthly shadows down his long, pale face, and in an instant a small thrill of recognition scuttled through my mind, only to be instantly dismissed as a trick of the darkness, a way of standing, some coincidence.

Before I could speak, he said, in a voice so deep that I wondered whether he had really spoken or whether I had merely imagined his words:

“It has taken me a long time to find you.”

“Who are you?” I asked hesitantly, “and what do you want?”

“I want nothing but to see you, and to bring you truth,” he replied.

Logic rushed to overcome the chill these words struck into me. A religious quack, one of those door-to-door peddlers of instant salvation!

“Look, I’m sorry,” I told him, “I’m not well and I cannot stand.…”

“I know,” he said, and proceeded to describe to me every one of the many symptoms which had baffled all my doctors—and I have described, lest I bore you, but a few of the symptoms which had for so long cursed me.

“How do you know all this?” I managed to whisper.

“Because it was I who caused you to have them.”

I could hardly believe my ears. How could this man, standing upon my doorstep in the late evening, with cars passing occasionally up and down the lane, not only to know about my illness—and far more about it than any other than my personal physician had been told—but claim that he had caused it? I asked him as much.

He told me who he was and I think I laughed. His face did not change, however, and my laughter died stillborn.

He told me that the others were all gone, that his last victim had been cremated at death and that now he was alone, and knew that sooner or later he would be found and destroyed by the old and proven methods, and that he had suddenly struck upon a way to propagate his kind. And he had done it.

He told me how to went to the national Blood Transfusion Service and gave a pint of his blood. How he ascertained to which hospital the blood was sent, and how he had stealthily prowled the hospital night after night until he had discovered the names of all the patients who had been given blood transfusions.

He had visited every one of them until he found me, and having seen me, he knew. He told me what I was and what I was becoming and he told me also that there was no hope, no cure; and I knew, as my heart died and my soul shrivelled that what he told me was the truth and that the books I had read for a cheap shudder, the films I had seen and laughed at as my fair Elizabeth clutched my hand in horror were no fiction but the truth, the evil, awful truth.

* * * *

He has just gone, although his haunted face seems still to hang in the silent space before my eyes…and now Elizabeth is standing at the head of the stairs in her nightdress, asking me who it was and what he wanted.

The light from the porch throws a faint light up the stairs, and her fair hair is tousled from sleep.

The slim column of her throat draws my eyes like a magnet and within me stirs a compulsion so intense, so awful, and so complete that I can only obey it.

I realize now that he is right, and only when all of them are like us will there be any escape from my terrors.

“Go to bed,” I tell my wife. “I’ll come up and kiss you goodnight.”